Between Them is a tactful, tender depiction of his late parents from Pulitzer Prize- winning author Richard Ford, told in 179 tremulous pages, a certifiable classic of the memoir genre.
Richard Ford, born in Jackson Misssissipi in 1944, is best known for his brilliant Frank Bascombe novels, The Sportswriter, Independence Day and Let Me Be Frank With You. He is also the author of the equally excellent The Lay of the Land and two collections of short stories.
His Arkansas parents, he relates in passing in this beautiful memoir, did not read books. His father Parker, despite a short fuse, was a reasonably contented man, as far as the author can ascertain - there are lots of prevarications and cautions. Parker worked as a travelling salesman for the Faultless starch company during the Depression era, and for years afterwards into the 1950s. He smoked a lot, put on weight over the years, drove a company car through his native Arkansas - through Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana - customarily accompanied by his wife, Edna. That was before Richard was born, which changed matters significantly. Mother stayed at home in the family's adopted city of Jackson, Mississippi, while dad was on the road Monday to Friday.
Because Parker's mother distrusted Edna (neé Akin), the woman who would become his wife - not least because she appeared to be an undeclared Catholic - this polite, hesitant man became part of her family. Her mother Essie was only 14 years older than her daughter, and Essie’s second husband Bennie was only three years older than Parker, who was born in 1904.
Ford is brilliant at describing how the young married couple made an unusual, social foursome with Edna’s parents. What my father, a big courteous stand-offish young husband, felt about Essie and Bennie, I don’t know. He may have gotten swept up a bit.
A few paragraphs later he writes: They were big personalities. They had scrapped beyond life in the boondocks, while my father was a travelling salesman from sixty miles up the road.
In the early years, before baby Richard arrived, the Fords stayed in hotels, dined out, and they liked company. A few drinks here and there with salesmen cronies of Parker’s. It was, the son concludes tentatively, an enviable life in its own way.
This delicately poised portrait of the author's parents is detached and coolly speculative, curious about interior lives and the essence of his folks' relationship. Yet the author is resigned too, to all he does not know about Edna and Parker's life before their one and only child was born relatively late in their marriage. A sensitive and astute account from one of the greatest writers working in English today.
